India Centre publications

A new Playbook from Cambridge Judge Business School on how developing economies can use digital infrastructure aims to provide a model for countries around the world.

Carlos Montes (Lead – Cambridge Innovation Hub for Prosperity), Centre for India and Global Business, writes about a visit to India's Silicon Valley to explore think tanks set up by Nandan Nilekani of Infosys.

A new Brokering Trust to Accelerate Innovation framework developed at Cambridge Judge Business School helps launch development projects through an honest broker.

Each of our research centres has unique ways to engage with non-academic organisations and, through that, to generate real world impact. This month we decided to share with you the work of the Centre for India & Global Business at Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS).

New book by Professor Jaideep Prabhu of Cambridge Judge Business School – How Should a Government Be? – outlines the state's role in the 21st Century.

Using Bollywood films to examine energy and household appliance use across four decades in India. Energy studies are often highly technical. A new study from the University of Cambridge takes a far more colourful approach, using 19 Indian feature films to document household energy and appliance use. "Bollywood isn’t usually associated with energy research, but this study takes a very novel approach to study social science through film," says co-author Jaideep Prabhu, Professor of Marketing and Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at Cambridge Judge Business School. "While the narrative of feature films is made up, the sets, especially in the so-called 'parallel cinema', are often very careful recreations of how things looked and people behaved at a particular point in time. By applying computer-based text and visual processing tools we can mine these films for the secrets they hold. The study shows how much insight into human behaviour we can get from a seemingly non-obvious source of data and analysis." The study by academics at the Department of Architecture and Cambridge Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge is published in the November 2020 issue of the journal Energy Research & Social Sciences. The research…

"Frugal innovation" can help governments respond better to the COVID-19 pandemic, says article co-authored by Professor Jaideep Prabhu in Stanford Social Innovation Review. The concept of "frugal innovation" can help governments and civil society organisations around the world respond better to the spread of COVID-19 (coronavirus), says an article co-authored by Professor Jaideep Prabhu of Cambridge Judge Business School published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The frugal innovation responses so far have been based on four underlying principles: "reuse, repurpose, recombine, and, informing all of the others, rapidity", the article says. Regarding reuse, it was recently announced that the common and inexpensive steroid dexamethasone, in use since the 1960s, has been found effective in treating COVID-19. Another example: owing to the shortage of personal protective equipment, people have found creative ways to manufacture masks and shields using hole punchers and other common household devices. On repurposing, or altering current valuable research for a new purpose, Indian and Pakistani railways have turned underused trains into intensive care wards, while around the world ski goggles have been converted to safety glasses. An example of recombining or the mixing of resources is the construction of hospitals in a very short time using…

Video thoughts of participants of the inaugural edition of InnoFrugal UK, the UK’s first conference dedicated to the subject of frugal innovation and the circular economy. The inaugural edition of InnoFrugal UK, the UK’s first conference dedicated to the topic of Frugal Innovation, was hosted by Cambridge Judge Business School on 27 March 2018. The Business School partnered with Ignitho Technologies and The Nordic Frugal Innovation Society to present the event. The conference, which built on earlier successful editions of the event in Nordic countries, included presentations by Jaideep Prabhu, Professor of Marketing at Cambridge Judge; Dr Khaled Soufani, Director of the Circular Economy Centre at Cambridge Judge; and Eben Upton (EMBA 2009), Founder and CEO of micro-computer maker Raspberry Pi. During the conference, we asked some participants to share their thoughts about the conference, frugal innovation and circular economy principles. Watch the videos Amanda Calvert, Founder of Quince Consultancy and member of the Cambridge Judge Advisory Board talks about the conference and circular economy principles. Melissa Simonetto, a masters student from the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, gives her thoughts on the InnoFrugal UK conference. Andy Clifton, Sustainability Manager – Engineering & Design at Rolls Royce,…

Professor Jaideep Prabhu says that doing more with less makes sense – whatever your location. On 26 January 2001, an earthquake of magnitude 7.9 hit Gujarat, India, killing over 25,000 people. Mansukhbhai Prajapati, a rural potter, escaped with his life but lost all his stock. All around him were people like him, coping with devastating loss and enormous practical problems. So he set out to help them in his way: he designed a fridge that would keep food fresh without electricity, using the only resource available to him – the clay with which he made pots. One of Prajapati’s small, squat fridges – the Mitti Cool – sits in the corner of Professor Jaideep Prabhu’s high-ceilinged, light-filled office at the Cambridge Judge Business School. No wires run out of the back: fill the top with water and it keeps the contents cool by the natural process of evaporation. The fridge is a superb example of the concept the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise highlights in his book Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth (co-authored with Navi Radjou and Simone Ahuja). Jugaad, a Hindi word, is the art of overcoming harsh constraints by improvising an…

A shoe repair shop on a Dutch military base is a good example of the circular economy and frugal innovation, which will be explored at the InnoFrugal UK conference at Cambridge Judge on 27 March 2018. When one traditionally thinks of a shoe repair shop, they might envision a storefront on a busy shopping street or, in Victorian days, a lonely cobbler stitching away under candlelight. Yet tucked away on a military base in the town of Soesterberg in the Netherlands is an orthopaedic shoe repair facility born in a different era and dedicated to a very timely mission: to prolong the life of military boots and reduce the need to buy new footwear for troops, in order to save both money and resources. It’s all part of a "circular economy" initiative of the Dutch Ministry of Defence and its clothing and personal equipment unit known as KPU (Kleding en Persoonsgebonden Uitrustingsbedrif), which has embraced the "frugal economy" movement of making the most of limited resources that began in developing countries like India and is rapidly advancing in the West. "The Dutch Defence Ministry illustrates how the circular economy is becoming more important in every aspect of society including big…